This month, Turner Classic Movies is paying tribute to the 20th Century’s “royal family of Broadway,” the Barrymores. Lionel, Ethel, and John Barrymore, that is, three siblings whose artful work brightened the stage and screen throughout the first half of the century.
These siblings were born between 1878 and 1882, and all were working stage actors by 1901. That year, Ethel became a sensation in CAPTAIN JINKS OF THE HORSE MARINES. Lionel’s most well-remembered early work began in 1912 when he became a regular player with the Biograph Company and appeared in more than fifty silent films shorts directed by none other than D.W. Griffith. John, known as the Great Profile, was the youngest and most beautiful. Historians will cite him as one of the foremost interpreters of RICHARD THE THIRD and HAMLET in the early to mid-1920s.
TCM has been showing a variety of Barrymore films. For me, the piece de resistance is the 1932 MGM feature RASPUTIN AND THE EMPRESS, the only film in which all three Barrymores co-star. This film is being aired on TCM on the evening of Monday, April 25. The screenplay by colorful Broadway playwright/journalist Charles MacArthur brings the viewer into the world of 1913 Russia—into the private universe of the Romanoff family. MGM let out all the stops when they budgeted for this sophisticated, though historically inaccurate, story of Rasputin the Mad Monk’s attempt to sabotage Romanoff rule.
One wonders how MGM came to depict the Tsar in a highly sympathetic manner. It is ludicrous when you consider that the families of MGM honchos Louis B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg, and Marcus Loew landed in North America as immigrants to escape bloody pogroms sparked by the Tsars against Russian Jews. Maybe the fact that the fate of the Romanoff royals was known to all spurred these filmmaking Semites into sanctioning such an odd, supportive story about a high-born royal family that encouraged the Cossacks to pillage, rape, and kill their relatives!
This was a prestige project. Just the fact that the three Barrymores would co-star makes it special. Seeing it today, one is struck by the maturity of the subject matter. There is an underlying theme that radicalized religion can bring trouble. There also is an undercurrent of perverted sexuality, most obvious in a scene in which Rasputin plies the under-aged Princess Maria with a religious keepsake.
This may sound strange, but I cannot help but think of the Everly Brothers singing harmonious duets when I see the Barrymores sharing scenes. Their matched DNA seems to give them a special ability to enter a singular imagined universe with a unique harmony—just like the Everly Brothers! The film was Ethel’s first talkie, and she often speaks in a stage voice—but the grandness of her character excuses any overplaying. Lionel wears a silly-looking long full beard, and if you are inclined to think MGM’s make-up department overdid it, google photos of the real Rasputin before you complain. All three Barrymores vied for audience attention in each sequence where they shared screen time but, in the end, that competition just adds to the legend.
Particularly enthralling is the violent climax between John, who plays good Prince Chegodieff, and Lionel as Rasputin. As a child, I would sit breathlessly two feet from the television screen every time this part of the film unfolded. Only with the publication of Margot Peters’ book, The House of Barrymore, in 1990 did I learn that that particular sequence was so inaccurate that the real-life Prince on whom John’s character was based sued MGM and collected somewhere between half a million and just under a million dollars in damages. After that payout, the film fell into the loss category.
MGM considered RASPUTIN AND THE EMPRESS a disaster; audiences stayed away. But I see it as a rather bizarre and exciting blockbuster, and it is the only opportunity we ever will have to see the three fabulous Barrymores together on the big screen!
Audrey Kupferberg is a film and video archivist and appraiser. She is lecturer emeritus and the former Director of Film Studies at the University at Albany and has co-authored several entertainment biographies with her husband and creative partner, Rob Edelman.
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